Projects

Speech Editor

There are many tools available to help you write down ideas. Cutting, copying, pasting, automatic outlines and templates - all of these things help us iteratively organize our thoughts into a linear stream. There is nothing to help us organize our thoughts non-linearly using speech only. Most people, when making a video sound-track, write out a script first. What if you could make the sound track without writing a word? What kind of changes in composition process would emerge? What would the speech product sound like? If audio/video becomes as commonplace an idea propagation medium (which it will) as text documents are now, we need tools, processes, genres, and activities to support idea generation and presentation in speech. That's what Speech Editor is about.

Prosodic Font

"Type is visible speech," wrote typographer Robert Bringhurst. Prosodic Font uses an abstraction of the vocal expression of a person's speech to animate a font. Prosody - the tune in speech - and speech rhythm, are the two basic elements in the design. These elements are used to animate the font width, height and weighting (think squash and stretch). As speech recognition systems become more robust and accurate, the difference between the processes of talking and writing will narrow, allowing new spaces for design to emerge. Prosodic Font is one of those new spaces.

Fugue

Text communication on the Net, both synchronous and asynchronous, either does not permit you to interrupt anyone else (like Chat), or the conversation representation doesn't show the interruptions clearly (like Talk). Fugue does both. it looks like a musical score for text chat. Unlimited people are allowed, but more than five is a crowd. ‘Talking’ textually in Fugue feels very alive and playful. It also allows people to send messages to a point in the score, so you can develop the conversation asynchronously (eg. chat and email combined).

Varied and Sundry Stuff

Typography * Five Person Chat* Book Cover Sketches * Poster